Audio blog: “Low fidelity”

Australians recently voted for their favourite bird, and, for once in 2013, we voted for the right candidate: the superb fairy wren.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t believe in climate change, either.

This colourful songbird frequents gardens throughout south-eastern Australia, and, for reasons I’ve already explained, is probably the coolest bird in the world. For this week’s Mindboggled audio blog, we found two people who adore fairy-wrens even more than I do: A/Prof Raoul Mulder and Dr Michelle Hall, two fairy-wren researchers from the University of Melbourne.

Together, we pick apart the mystery of bird fidelity, and explain why superb fairy-wrens make the worst breeding partners of all.

Andrew Katsis and Christopher Gatto are MSc candidates in zoology at the University of Melbourne. The audio blog contains music by Kevin MacLeod (courtesy of Incompetech.com, used under Creative Commons By Attribution 3.0), and sound effects from SoundBible.com (Creative Commons By Attribution 3.0) and PDSounds.org (public domain).